Sometimes what I'm looking for is the thing that will help renew people's interest in a writer that they may have written off as not their kind of writer.
John D'AgataIn some ways we want definitions that can help protect our own interpretations of the genre.
John D'AgataI look for the kind of text that doesn't look like the writer I'm considering. Plutarch is a great example.
John D'AgataPlutarch's peers were writing "rhetorics," which were these dry philosophical treatises that made really broad gestures about life and death and fate. Plutarch stepped out of the stream to create an essayistic form that relied on a digressive structure and down to earth anecdotes.
John D'AgataI get emails from students at programs all over the country who want to transfer to Iowa, and in most cases their frustrations have absolutely nothing to do with the programs they're attending. They have to do with the growing pains that they're undergoing as writers and with the growing pains that our own genre is constantly undergoing.
John D'Agata